Conference: MSA 2019, Toronto (October 17 – 20)Panel Title: How Red Is Modernism?Organizers: Matthew Gannon and Tavid Mulder The perennial issue of the politics of modernism is in season once again. We might now finally be in a position to leave behind the intransigent Cold War opposition of political realism and apolitical modernism, opening the possibility of reevaluating modernist politics. Mark Steven's recent book Red Modernism, for instance, makes concrete historical connections between leftist social and political events and the practices and theories of literary modernism.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois famously conceptualized doubleness as the condition of black life in America, asserting: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” African American literature has often thematically foregrounded double-consciousness, in addition to representing doubles, doppelgängers, and other forms of duality.

This flightless, multi-site conference (Sept. 18-21, 2019) invites interdisciplinary attention to confluences between environmental and religious perspectives and practices in the long Anglophone nineteenth century (1780-1900). Since that century, anthropogenic climate change has rapidly accelerated, and in response to this legacy we will avoid air travel by digitally connecting events at several conference sites in the United States and the United Kingdom. In addition, this method of networking, by lowering barriers of cost and transportation, promises to enable a more diverse and inclusive range of participation than is often possible at international conferences.

In her conversation with Katherine Mckittrick, Sylvia Wynter reminds us that black/lesbian/feminists in the sixties such as June Jordan took up and further elaborated “the color line’s range of subjectively experienced nonnormalcy of being.” They voiced their outcry against what Jordan defines as our “unbearable wrongness of being.” This panel examines the presidential theme of being human by shifting our gaze to the abject spaces and formulations that function to deny humanity to certain subjects. To create the “human” normative literary and cultural production interprets racialized and queer subjects through the lens of social death.

William Faulkner Society Open Call for Papers The William Faulkner Society is issuing an open call for papers. Submit 250-word individual abstracts or panel proposals with panel description, 250-word abstracts, and panelists' email addresses in Word attachments to Taylor Hagood at thagood@fau.edu.

The Second Annual City College of New York Graduate Literature Conference

Conference Date: May 17, 2019

Submission Deadline: April 5, 2019

Landscapes inspire contemplation. Some consider landscapes to be natural while others see them as something created by effacing people and their work. Much literature centers on relationships between people and landscapes and how these relationships are shaped by economic forces.

The annual conference of the Modern Language Association will meet on January 9-12, 2020, in Seattle, WA.

This special session seeks to recover forgotten authors’ lived responses to white supremacy beyond the black-white dichotomy. Focus will be on North American authors and justice movements from 1865-1965.

Please submit your 250-word proposal and brief C.V. to DeLisa Hawkes (dhawkes@umd.edu) and Tim Bruno (tbruno@umd.edu) by Friday, March 15, 2019. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions.

What are/should be Chaucerian scholarship’s ethical commitments? What is/could be its relation to Chaucerian adaptations in various media? Gender, sexuality, race, and class; politics of Chaucer scholarship and amateur or creative Chauceriana. 250-word abstracts for roundtable presentations by March 15 to Catherine Sanok (sanok@umich.edu) and Cord Whitaker (cwitak3@wellesley.edu).

What can/should be the role of the premodern in the transhistorical history of race? Chaucer/Shakespeare’s entanglements in the history of racialization; the history of race before race. Please submit 250-word abstracts of roundtable-length papers by March 1st to susie-phillips@northwestern.edu and/or mmdowd1@ua.edu.

In his memoir, Bootstraps, Victor Villanueva shrewdly points out that “The community college is torn between vocational training and preparing the unprepared for traditional university work. And it seems unable to resolve the conflict.” This view of community colleges hasn’t changed much since Villanueva’s book was published in the early 1990s.

World War I was a pivotal moment for William Faulkner. He changed the spelling of his name to join the Royal Air Force. Although the war ended before he finished flight training, he wore a pilot’s uniform around Oxford, Mississippi. He wrote his first novel about the war, he wrote his first Yoknapatawpha novel about the war, he wrote several short stories about the war, and he wrote one of his late novels about the war.

We are inviting proposals for the Modes of Capture Symposium which will be held at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at University of Limerick in partnership with Liz Roche Company and Dublin Dance Festival. DATES: Friday 21st June to Sunday 23rd June 2019 The theme of the symposium is an exploration of the various means of capturing creative process to engage with the layers, threads, fragments and memories that interweave throughout the process of dancemaking.

The Midwest Modern Language Association welcomes, especially but not exclusively, proposals dealing with every aspect of the theme “Duality, Doubles and Doppelgängers” for the 2019 conference in Chicago, Illinois, November 14-17, 2019. A general description of this theme can be found here.

Though usually relegated to second status critically, the short story is having a moment. When Canadian writer Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013, it was specifically for her contribution to the short story genre. As a writer who does not write novels, she acknowledged the importance of the award: “It’s a wonderful thing for the short story.” Indeed.

Description: This session invites proposals on narrative theory as it relates to pedagogy and writing/composition studies or literary studies, particularly those including, but not limited to, multimodal learning, WPA curricula, the quest narrative, student efficacy, research writing, new and interesting approaches to canonical texts, comparative and contemporary literature, the graphic novel, genre studies, and memoir studies.

MLA 2020: "Early Modern Resilience: Shakespeare and Beyond," Special Session

How does early modern literature portray the resilience of women or other marginalized groups in times of crisis? What strength or power is found in resilience? Is resilience similar to #resist, the experience of domestic violence, or #metoo? How can we understand resilience within feminist criticism, critical race theory, post-colonialism, or other methodologies? How does resilience change our reading (or performance) of a text, and can we begin to theorize the way resilience functions in the early modern world? All texts from the early modern world and all methodologies welcome.